The Ranch.

I would need to find what it meant, or it was likely that Luis and Isabel would never really be safe.

The trip from Albuquerque to Sedona, Arizona, took only about five hours—a remarkably short time, given the pleasurable experience of riding the motorcycle. It felt like effortless gliding, a reminder of all that I had once been. Despite the helmet, I felt less closed-in than I had in either airplanes or cars, and the sense of the wind passing over me, the sun beating hot on my back, gave me a kind of peace I hadn’t realized I had missed.

As a Djinn, I had been connected to the Mother through Conduits—for most of my memory that Conduit had been a Djinn named Jonathan, a mortal who had died well before recorded human history had begun. Many thousands of years later—and only a year ago, if so much—Jonathan had chosen to die so that his friend David could live on, and that had splintered the Djinn. It had ultimately divided us, made Ashan the connection for the Old Ones, like me, and David the Conduit for New Djinn.

But there were other ways to reach the Mother than the Conduits, and the place I was going was one. I had chosen the location that was not only closest, but most likely to welcome me; the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona was holy to Djinn as well as humans, and served two purposes. The human worship was unimportant to me, but in that chapel resided an avatar of the Earth herself—an Oracle.

It was possible this Oracle would speak to me, even trapped in a lowly human body.

She had, after all, been similarly trapped once.

I had never visited the chapel in human form; this spot had existed on the aetheric, as well, since time began, and I had never been forced to interact with an Oracle with the burden of skin and bone. As I glided the motorcycle at a low purr into the parking area, the sun was flaring its last on the red sandstone rocks, and it was as beautiful a thing as I’d seen since opening human eyes.

And I was afraid that she would not receive me.

I took the long flights of stairs at a run, hoping that the activity would chase away the cold fear; all it accomplished was to bring an ache to my muscles, and sweat to trickle beneath my leather jacket. A Djinn died here. I had felt that powerful event even so far away, on the highest levels of the aetheric. Ashan had killed her. He had not reckoned with the consequences of that action, or how very angry Mother Earth had been with him for his crime.

Ashan, too, had almost lost his life. I did not think it had taught him any genuine lessons.

The doors at the top of the landing stood closed and locked. It was after the times posted for visitors, but that was meant for humans, not for me.

Surely, not for me.

I reached out to touch the warm metal of the handle, and I felt an answering stir behind the door, something vast and powerful and intensely old.

The door clicked open without any action from me.

Within, sunset spilled through the huge glass windows, tinting the simple, small church in vivid oranges and dusky reds.

A woman sat on a wooden pew near the back. As I walked toward her, I slowed; I hadn’t expected her to be so clearly recognizable. And so much a mirror of her mother.

“Imara,” I said. “I am—”

“Cassiel,” she said. Her dark hair rippled in a breeze I couldn’t feel, as did her brick red dress around her knees and feet. Her face seemed human, but her eyes were immortal, and more than mere Djinn.

I sank down to one knee and bent my head.

“No need for that,” Imara said. Her voice seemed to come from a long distance, echoing oddly in the stone walls of the chamber. “Sit. You’ve come a long way.” I didn’t know whether she meant now, on the motorcycle, or in a larger sense. . . . From Djinn to what I was now was surely a very long fall.

It didn’t seem right to make myself comfortable in her presence, but I eased myself onto the pew at the end, as far from her as I could manage. I could feel the slow, strong pulse of Earth power from her, like the heartbeat of the Mother, and it frightened me. I longed for it, and I was afraid. . . . . . . Afraid I no longer deserved to feel it. I craved it, though. My hands trembled with the force of it.

Imara said, “It’s hard to talk to you in this form. I don’t have much time.”

I avoided her gaze. “I need—” I couldn’t finish the thought. She knew, in any case.

“I can’t help you. Ashan is your Conduit. If he chooses to cut you off, there is nothing any Oracle can do.”

“I—I know. I don’t ask that.” I waited until she slowly nodded.

“Your Warden, then,” she said. “You want to know why events took the course they did. Why he is dead.”

“I know why he’s dead.” My voice sounded rough and odd to my ears. “Enemies fired guns at him. Bullets ripped his flesh. And I chose revenge over duty.”

“Sometimes revenge and duty are the same,” Imara said. Her voice was getting even fainter, and the wind tossing her hair stronger. “I’m not connected anymore to the human world, except through my mother, but I can tell you one thing: You couldn’t have saved him. I can see all the possible roads, and they all end in the same place for Manny Rocha and his wife.”

I expected to feel relief, knowing that it wasn’t my fault, but all I could feel, here in this quiet place, was a vast sense of emptiness. “I liked him,” I said. It sounded very strange. “I liked Manny. I liked Angela. And they’re gone.”

Imara studied me, and there was something frightening about being looked on by such a power. There was compassion in it, but at such a vast distance that its warmth couldn’t reach me. “I know,” she said. “But it’s how they live. It has its own power, that frailty.”

The injustice of that threatened to overthrow my self-control. “I want justice. I want their killers to pay.”

“Those who killed them already paid.”

“Not enough.”

She didn’t answer. She only studied me for so long that it felt like a geologic age was passing.

“You left the child,” she finally said.

“I had to. The police—”

“The child misses you. She grieves, and she needs you.”

Suddenly, with a strength that shocked me, I remembered the feeling of Isabel’s arms around my neck, of her warm body in my arms. Oh. It hurt so much that I wrapped my own arms over my stomach and rocked slowly back and forth, trying to drive away the pain.

It only sank deeper, and carried with it a terrible sadness.

I felt tears form hot in my eyes and trickle down my face. My head felt hot and tight, and I gasped for breath.

Imara’s hand touched my shoulder. It should have made me hurt less, but instead the grief tightened in on itself in a choking spiral, and I began to sob, as helpless as any human.

“You’re learning,” she said. “That’s good. You can’t be a Djinn now, Cassiel. You have to be something else. It hurts, but it’s a true thing, what you are. You’re bound to the world now.”

I had always thought the Djinn more connected to one another—bound by the cords of power. But now I was seeing that humans were bound to one another, as well, in strange and difficult knots.

It should have felt like a trap. I would have thought it so once.

“You have to go back to them,” she told me. “I know it’s dangerous, and I know it won’t be easy, but your future doesn’t lie here with me, or with any Djinn. It’s with them. If you want to find the truth about what happened to your friends, you must go back.”

“Back,” I repeated. “Back to what?”

“To Isabel. To Luis.” The color of her eyes shifted between embers, flames, the pure gold at the heart of the sun, black, gray. “I know it’s difficult to believe, but a power has put you here for a reason, Cassiel.”

I sucked in an unsteady breath and wiped tears from my face. “I’m here because of Ashan.”